Facilities

ARCTEC has a wide range of state of the art facilities and equipment. Our insectaries and testing rooms are temperature and humidity-controlled to provide the optimum conditions for rearing and product testing.

Insectaries

LSHTM holds a unique and extremely valuable collection of arthropods including many species of mosquitoes as well as bed bugs, cockroaches, triatomine bugs, sandflies and house dust mites. We also have access to Culicoides biting midges and other insects. Many of our arthropod strains have important characteristics (for example, susceptibility or resistance to insecticides) that are essential for the testing of arthropod control products.

Laboratories

We have several state-of-the-art laboratories that allow us to do fundamental and developmental work including electrophysiology, HPLC-MS, PCR and much more.

Free-flight room

Our unique free-flight rooms allow us to evaluate effective dose and complete protection time of repellent and insecticidal products under a more natural setting. These tests can be particularly useful for evaluation of spatial repellents.

Olfactometers

We have several behavioural arenas and olfactometers to examine fundamental behavioural effects of repellent or attractant products/materials for flying and crawling insects. We have state-of-the-art video-tracking equipment (EthoVision®) which can record and analyse intricate behaviour of insects. This can be a useful service for fundamental studies and for initial stages of product development.

Potter Tower

A Potter tower is used for accurate application of insecticides onto substrates or organisms as a direct spray or as a residual film.